Why March Madness Rakes In More Ad Revenue Than The NBA And MLB Post Seasons

Streeter Lecka/Getty Images Even though it is a non-profit organization, the NCAA (National Collegiate Athletic Association) continues to do a brilliant job of marketing its March Madness men's college basketball tournament, which is celebrating its 76th year in 2014.

Brief history

Today, the competition has grown to 68 teams over 3 weeks competing in regional tournaments and culminating in a final contest between the top two. This year the contest will include 67 games that can be watched live, streamed online, or viewed later.

Branding the tournament and playoffs

With a penchant for alliteration, the NCAA has created brand identities for the entire tournament and interim playoffs by giving them names such as March Madness, Sweet Sixteen, Elite Eight, and Final Four. Even non-fans hear these words from sportscasters, late-night TV hosts and comedians.

They pass them on to their friends via word-of-mouth and social media. They also attend branded parties, buy advertised products, and participate in office "bracket pools." This gets advertisers excited by the prospect of reaching a much larger, highly-engaged audience of fans and non-fans alike — enabling them to leverage their marketing investment.

Expanding coverage

Media coverage has grown to four television networks (CBS, TNT, TBS, and truTV) and numerous radio and online channels, such as, cbssports.com, ncaa.com, espn.com, and si.com - enabling fans to watch the games and interact with each other on their mobile devices. The NCAA also created March Madness Live (MML), an online HDTV channel. In 2013, March Madness Live had 45 million video streams - a 158% increase over 2012. These produced a whopping 12.6 million hours of live streaming, which was a 201% increase in traffic over the previous year.

Promoting the NCAA brand via social media

In addition to traditional TV and radio channels, historical content and commentary are distributed online through favored fan sites, such as Yahoo!, CBS, and ESPN, and MML. Everyone involved with the tournament also communicates via popular social media sites.

Facebook. March Madness has a Facebook fan page with over 475,000 fans and "like" links to such other sites as NCAA (126,000 fans), iHoops (511,045 fans), CBS Sports (565,000 fans), and many other sports links. Each of these, in turn has their own like links leading to additional Facebook word-of-mouth pyramids.

Twitter. The tournament is a major trend on Twitter with its own pyramid of followers (over 144,000 as of this writing).

YouTube. At the time of this writing, search results for March Madness yielded 397,000 results, and the tournament has not even started! People can watch videos of games they missed or make their own commentary videos that help to further promote the brand.

What organizations can learn from March Madness marketing

By examining the marketing techniques used by the NCAA, marketers can perhaps learn how to better do the following:

Create names, slogans and logos that are easy to remember. If they are, people will broadcast them for you and further your brand reach, frequency, and engagement.

Apply branding and promotion techniques employed by March Madness.

Create contests and games as an effective way to teach prospects and customers the benefits of your products while they have fun competing for prizes.

Generate newsworthy events that capture the imagination of the news media so they will promote them for you at no charge. Nike is perhaps one of the best examples of using the news media as part of their marketing strategies.

Provide traditional and social media with the information they need to publicize your products and events for free.

Tie-in with events such as March Madness to leverage your brand and promotion.

The NCAA continues to achieve a slam-dunk

Even though the NCAA is a non-profit organization that many would not associate with brilliant marketing, they have done an enviable job of taking the March Madness Tournament and turning into one of the most popular sports showcases for advertisers — ahead of the NBA (National Basketball Association) and Major League Baseball. If you think about it, that is incredible. In basketball terms, it's a slam-dunk.